BlinkM

Have you wanted an LED that can fade from deep red to bright purple? Flash like a police light? “Breathe” softly? Glow like a firefly? Turn on with the subtle fade of an incandescent bulb? Flicker like a candle?

That’s BlinkM, a smart LED that lets you do all of that without having to know any electronics engineering or programming.

We attached an ultra bright wide-angle RGB LED to a microcontroller with onboard memory and our software that makes creating arbitrary light colors and smooth color patterns very easy. BlinkM Sequencer–our free Open Source sequencing software runs on most operating systems–makes it easy to select any RGB color or pattern and instantly upload it to BlinkM (we also provide Java, C, and Processing libraries and programming examples for using it).

Once programmed, the BlinkM can be detached from its programming interface and work standalone. It will then glow the programmed color or play the programmed pattern whenever 5 volts is applied, just like a regular LED, but with much more flexibility. It can be reprogrammed thousands of times, or stay tethered and be controlled using simple software commands, changing colors in real time.